Update.strip is now available.
I can't make heads or tails of Getting Up, seriously, and that's even when weird glitches aren't halting all progress. I'm going to give it another go, but it's weird how much more amenable I am to wholly alien cultures in games than I am this stew of urban brand identities. As a known lexiconnoisseur, there's little I enjoy more than raiding a context for its exclusive jargon - but there's like four fucking games here, none of them great, and I don't know which one I hate the most.
Luckily, Grandia III has managed to cleanse our palette. I'm playing it with Gabe, and we've detailed how it usually works to be engaged in such an effort. Thus far, the old enmities haven't surfaced. With this much fun so close to the surface, the flagellation I endure finding the chewy center of other games stops looking like due diligence and becomes something like masochism.
With RPG combat systems wresting more and more control away from players - and I have faith that you can derive which franchise I'm alluding to - it's a relief that Grandia has retained a fully turn-based system where position and timing still matter. There are actually spots on the controller where our tears of jubilation disturbed the hand oils and snack residue.
It is that fruit so succulent it bends the bough, almost buxom in its fullness.
Combat-wise, at least. Having only picked it up a couple days ago, we do not have the wisdom that might have come with a review copy in the weeks prior - Jane tells us that the game's story largely evaporates by the second disc. Good riddance, I say. She sends up JRPG bullshit in the first paragraph of her review, and I'm happy to take it from there.
The stories in most of the JRPGs we get are fucking garbage. Is this a controversial statement? Only the most dominated nihongophile recoils, straining on his Eastern leash. These "stories" are challenges in an of themselves: like a hulking boss creature, they are trials against which the human mind must strive. Exhausting existential retreads that course through the meat of the brain like poison.
There is a defense, however. Like the protagonist in Pi, I've long since drilled out some portion of that organ - the part that stays up all night in coffee shops talking about whether or not God wears white. That cortex is outta there. Or it's still there, but there's a cavern bored through it so that the things teenagers think are deep fall right out.
(CW)TB out.
